David Henry Hwang's modern classic, M. BUTTERFLY charts the scandalous romance between a married French diplomat and a mysterious Chinese opera singer - a remarkable love story of international espionage and personal betrayal. Their 20-year relationship pushed and blurred the boundaries between male and female, east and west - while redefining the nature of love and the devastating cost of deceit.
Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe Award winner Clive Owen will star as Rene Gallimard in the first Broadway revival of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, M. BUTTERFLY, directed by Tony Award winner Julie Taymor.
For the Tony Award-winning play's first Broadway return, Hwang will introduce new material inspired by the real-life love affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu that has come to light since the play's 1988 premiere.
The qualities that make Clive Owen such a powerful and enigmatic film actor haven't translated to the stage of Cort Theatre. That's where he's headlining a lackluster Broadway revival of M. Butterfly, the nearly 30-year-old Tony Award-winning American play inspired by the true story of a French diplomat convicted of espionage, who claimed he wasn't aware that his Chinese mistress was actually a man and a spy.
Three decades later, M. Butterfly remains provocative and timely, with a great deal to unpack-in part because Hwang, in an unusually extensive revision of the text for its current Broadway revival, has stuffed it with new information. The humiliated Rene Gallimard (Clive Owen) still begins the play in the cocoon of a French prison cell, guiding the audience through flashbacks to his time with Song Liling (Jin Ha, continuously intriguing). But the nature of their intercultural romance has shifted. When they meet in this version, Gallimard knows that Song is male; Song must invent a far-fetched family history to convince him otherwise. These changes, among others, help shift the storytelling away from symbolism and toward a more specific account of a particular relationship, albeit a bizarre one. Aside from lively dance sequences set at the Peking Opera-which was traditionally all-male, Song notes, 'Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act'-there are few spectacular flourishes.
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2017 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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